Barnaby Walters

Arranging atoms and pressurising air in a variety of manners, such as:

Pronouns: they/he

  1. Here’s a KDE Plasma service menu (dolphin context menu action) for creating a valid CACHEDIR.TAG file in the selected folder. Useful for excluding things from being backed up! (e.g. via restic with the --exclude-caches option)

    [Desktop Entry]
    Type=Service
    MimeType=inode/directory
    Actions=create_cachedir_tag
    
    [Desktop Action create_cachedir_tag]
    Name=Create CACHEDIR.TAG
    Icon=breeze/actions/22/document-edit-encrypt
    Exec=echo "Signature: 8a477f597d28d172789f06886806bc55" > %u/CACHEDIR.TAG
    

    Put it somewhere like .local/share/kio/servicemenus/cachedir-tag.desktop, make it executable and it should show up in your context menu.

  2. At the time of writing, due to a packaging mess-up, the builds of SDR++ (and many other SDR tools by the looks of it) have suddenly and unintentionally dropped support for the popular RTL-SDR software defined radio dongle. Until this is fixed, users will have to build these applications themselves. The instructions are a little lacking in details, so here’s exactly how to do that, working on Kubuntu:

    # To install:
    sudo aptitude install cmake libfftw3-dev libglfw3-dev libvolk-dev zstd libairspy-dev librtlsdr-dev
    git clone https://github.com/AlexandreRouma/SDRPlusPlus.git
    cd SDRPlusPlus
    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ..
    make -j5 # 5 is the number of threads to use for building. adjust to your preference
    sh ../create_root.sh
    sudo make install
    
    # To run:
    sdrpp
    

  3. Reddit recently underwent another new, unpopular redesign, meaning that there are now three different UIs for accessing the website. Out of habit I would look at new-new reddit before remembering to switch to old-new reddit, and quickly noticed that looking at new-new reddit causes my laptop’s fans instantly start spinning.

    Here’s a firefox performance profile for 20-30s of each iteration of the reddit homepage. I simply loaded the page and did absolutely nothing.

    old.reddit.com: constant ~5% CPU usage with occasional spikes up to ~90%

    new.reddit.com: usually 0% CPU usage with occasional bursts up to ~50%

    reddit.com (new-new reddit): constant 30% CPU usage with occasional spikes even higher

    I don’t have the time or knowledge required to dig into the performance profiler but I would be fascinated to know how old-new reddit ended up more efficient than old-old reddit, and exactly what new-new reddit is doing with 30% of my CPU??

  4. When importing photos into DigiKam, I want them to be renamed based on the ISO8601 datetime they were taken, ideally to millisecond precision to avoid conflicts when multiple images were taken in a single second. This has the nice side-effect that photos from multiple camera sources are guaranteed to be displayed in the correct order when browsing files, which is important and practical for me.

    I started out using this custom file renaming template on import:

    [date:"yyyy-MM-ddTHHMMss"]-[file]
    

    as DigiKam’s [date] placeholder didn’t have an option for milliseconds, and I couldn‘t find a counter option which could handle my desired “append -# per-collision if this renaming scheme results in collisions”, so ended up just adding the entire camera-generated filename to the end.

    Unfortunately, this led to my files all being in the wrong order, even from the same camera. I haven’t quite figured out why, but it seems that there are several different internal datetime values stored in the image files: file creation date (which is completely wrong), the values used in DigiKam’s [date] templates (which are mostly wrong), and the DateTimeOriginal values stored in Exif data, which are not only correct but provide sub-second resolution too!

    So here’s the DigiKam import naming template which I will be using going forward:

    [meta:Exif.Photo.DateTimeOriginal]{range:1,10}{replace:":","-"}T[meta:Exif.Photo.DateTimeOriginal]{range:12,}{replace:":",""}s[meta:Exif.Photo.SubSecTimeOriginal]
    

    which produces ISO8601-ish filenames like this:

    2023-06-16T143139s922.JPG
    

    Broken down,

    [meta:Exif.Photo.DateTimeOriginal]
    

    evalulates to a string like

    2023:06:16 14:31:39
    

    but I don’t want colons in filenames for portability, so I take only the date part with {range:1,10}, replace the colons with hyphens {replace:":","-"}, add a literal T separator to avoid spaces in filenames, take the time part of the datetime and remove the colons completely, add a literal s separator to delimit seconds and milliseconds as I wanted to keep them separate but not use the typical . delimiter.

  5. Ended up getting frustrated with the old version of DigiKam available on Kubuntu, so tried installing an AppImage. The state of AppImage integration with Kubuntu is abysmal, and I open DigiKam fairly regularly, so I finally tried installing AppImageLauncher, which is recommended by DigiKam and is supposed to be a good tool for integrating AppImages with the desktop environment (something which Plasma should surely do itself, if AppImages are really going to be part of the future of linux app packaging).

    Unfortunately, installing AppImageLauncher completely broke my desktop environment, causing it to hang and preventing me from logging in. Looked it up and it was clearly related to whatever this issue is about, as moving .local/share/mime fixed it. Removing AppImageLauncher and the mime cache got things working again, and, lo, before it broke my system, AppImageLauncher had kindly made .desktop files for all my AppImages!

    At this point I decided to take a more manual approach to integrating AppImages I cared about with my DE, so I added a link from ~/Applications (where I store AppImages and other applications not installed via the package manager) to ~/.local/share/applications, where .desktop files are kept. Having quick access to this location makes manually managing .desktop files much more bearable, and I went about improving the ones AppImageLauncher had made (e.g. adding version numbers to the names – I find it very useful to know what version of an app I’m launching).

    So, back to DigiKam: at this point I had a DigiKam 8.3 AppImage installed and openable via launchers thanks to the .desktop file. It had to re-download the facial recognition files, but other than that picked up everything from before. However, in the main photo list view, the maximum size of the thumbnails was tiny.

    I spent some time poking around in settings and tweaking the QT scaling factor via the .desktop file, but I’ll spare you the details. tl;dr: if you want the DigiKam 8.3 AppImage to let you see large thumbnails on a high-DPI screen, you need to check the following boxes:

    • Miscellaneous → System → Use high DPI scaling from the screen factor
    • Vews → Icons → Use large thumbnail size for high screen resolution

    Restart DigiKam, and it should let you make thumbnails large enough to be useful. This is especially necessary seeing as how DigiKam’s photo list view has a horribly wasteful layout, with almost as much whitespace as photo surface area.

  6. Some tips for using Teensy on linux:

    The teensy board support package is only supported in the Arduino applications downloaded directly from the arduino site, NOT on versions distributed by package managers. I used the AppImage and it worked fine. If you try to install the teensy board package on an unsupported version of Arduino you might see errors like “archive not supported”.

    Even when you have a supported version of Arduino installed, installing the Teensy board package isn’t totally reliable. The first time I downloaded it, compiling would fail with the following error:

    fork/exec /home/barnaby/.arduino15/packages/teensy/tools/teensy-compile/11.3.1/arm/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++: no such file or directory
    
    Compilation error: fork/exec /home/barnaby/.arduino15/packages/teensy/tools/teensy-compile/11.3.1/arm/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++: no such file or directory
    

    The 11.3.1 folder existed, but was empty. Down- then upgrading the board package didn‘t fix it. Removing the board package and reinstalling it did work.

  7. If you’re getting the following error in Inkscape on (k)ubuntu when trying to open the Extension Manager:

    [long traceback snipped]
    ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'appdirs'
    

    the best way to deal with it seems to be sudo apt install python3-appdirs, as trying to install the appdirs module with pip or pip3 might not put it in the right place for the system python3 which inkscape is using, especially if you use something like conda or pyenv.

  8. If you’re in the unfortunate position of needing to use MuseScore4 on linux for some reason (for example to use its excellent MIDI to notation conversion) and are having issues with the Flatpak version having an unreadably tiny UI on high-DPI screens, here’s how to fix it.

    Open the .desktop file for MuseScore 4 – mine was in /var/lib/flatpak/app/org.musescore.MuseScore/current/active/export/share/applications/org.musescore.MuseScore.desktop

    Find the Exec key, and change the command to include --env=QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2. Mine ended up looking like this:

    Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --env=QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=mscore --file-forwarding org.musescore.MuseScore @@ %F @@
    

    Save (you’ll need to enter your password, or to have launched the editor with sudo).

    Try launching MuseScore again. If you’re lucky, it’ll have a readable UI. If not, try restarting and launching it again — I haven’t found a way of successfully getting KDE to force-update all its .desktop files. Presumably there’s a cache somewhere? If anyone knows how to reliably do this, please let me know!

    This should work for any Flatpak which uses QT, on any desktop environment which uses .desktop files. I really hope “UI Scale” becomes a standard per-application setting in the near future.

    EDIT: thanks to carmanaught on the KDE forums for this additional suggestion to copy the .desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications rather than editing it in-place, and for details about how to set up a service to watch this folder and clear the desktop file cache whenever it’s edited.

  9. Barnaby Walters: Notes from the first day using a Slimbook Executive running Kubuntu (probably applies to anyone moving from macos to Kubuntu on similar hardware) Generally, very good first impressions. The hardware is nice, the connectivity is perfect for me, it boots fast, the screen looks amazing. The keyboard and trackpad are fine, except for the surfboard trackpad button design. Came with a bunch of stupid marketing stickers on (what year is this, 2005?), most of which were easily removed. Here are the first settings I tweaked to make things more familiar: UI Scaling Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Global Scale = 200% for a readable UI while still remaining beautifully crisp. Settings -> Appearance -> Cursors -> Size: 48 Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Login Screen -> Apply Plasma Settings so that your login screen is a sensible size. Right click status bar, enter edit mode, Panel height: 100 Sleep Default sleep mode seems to be a hibernation which takes 10-20s to wake up from, including whenever you close the lid. Fix this by: In settings -> Power Management, in AC Powered tab set lid close to just turn off screen (or lock if desired). This will just turn off the screen when closed on AC power, but actually put the laptop to sleep when the lid is closed on battery power, to reduce power consumption. Then, sudo nano /etc/systemd/sleep.conf and uncomment AllowSuspendThenHibernate=yes, and reboot. This changes the behaviour of sleep to initially just suspend the system, keeping data in RAM and allowing immediate wake-ups. When the battery goes under 5%, it’ll instead hibernate, which takes 10-20s to wake up from but stores the contents of RAM on the SSD. EDIT: On further testing, this sadly doesn’t fix the issue completely (or at all? It’s hard to tell). Putting the computer to sleep using the meta menu works absolutely fine, but using F1 or the laptop lid (which I assume are handled the same way internally) leads to this blank screen with a cursor and hidden password entry field for 20s on wake up issue. I have no idea what’s causing it, and IMO it’s a big reason not to use KDE Plasma on these laptops — sadly, as it’s easily my favourite of the linux desktop environments I’ve tried so far. FURTHER EDIT: turns out this was all due to the laptop coming with an outdated linux kernel installed, which didn’t support the hardware. A fresh install of the latest Kubuntu works perfectly. Firefox By default, Firefox treats scroll events from the trackpad as scroll wheel inputs, causing jerky scrolling. To fix: echo MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 | sudo tee -a /etc/environment Touchpad Settings -> Input Devices -> Touchpad Pointer acceleration: 0.6 Tap-to-click, tap-and-drag enabled Two-finger tap: right click Scrolling: two fingers, invert scroll direction Right click: press anywhere with two fingers Function Buttons Boot holding F2 to open BIOS settings, dig around to find and enable “Fn lock” to make the function keys perform their alternative functions by default (with numbered function inputs available by holding Fn, as on a MacBook) Next pain points which I didn’t find a solution to yet: Occasional trackpad issues where the cursor freezes and only starts moving again after a two finger tap (right click). At the beginning this happened all the time, now it seems much better. Need to keep an eye on it. File browser not having a column view. Apparently this is an ongoing struggle for years in Kubuntu, which seems hard to believe. I tried to install the ElementaryOS file viewer but it didn’t seem to work. Setting up the keyboard for international typing. I got extremely used to typing special characters, diacritics and fancy punctuation on my macbook keyboard and am reluctant to have to re-learn all of that. Ideally I’d like to get a least a large subset of the key combinations working again.

    Macbook -> Kubuntu Slimbook update 2:

    After a brief dalliance with PopOS (which I liked well enough, but convinced me that I much prefer Plasma over Gnome), thanks to advice from someone on r/Kubuntu I discovered that most of my Kubuntu issues had been due to Slimbook delivering laptops with an old version of Kubuntu and the linux kernel on, which isn’t really compatible with their laptops (and I had foolishly assumed that the system software update would also update the kernel — not so) tl;dr: if you buy a Slimbook laptop and want to run Kubuntu on it, install it yourself!

    Desktop Environment

    After trying out Plasma on both X11 and Wayland, I decided to opt for sticking with Wayland, despite a few “showstoppers” and other minor annoyances. It has excellent support for a lot of quite slick features, such as fractional per-monitor UI scaling and multitouch gestures for switching virtual desktops (currently not yet configurable, hopefully this will change in the future).

    The current stable release of GIMP uses an old version of GTK which doesn’t scale well under Wayland, but fortunately the development release (2.99.16) has GTK3 support and the UI scales just fine.

    VLC also looks very weird under Plasma. I kept it around as it’s so useful, but also installed Celluloid 0.25.1 from their PPA as a potential Plasma-friendly replacement.

    Keyboards

    I type almost exclusively in ABC-Extended on my macbook, which gives me quick access to all the international characters I need access to, as well as some nice punctuation like en+em dashes, ellipses and curly quotes.

    I tried several keyboard layouts on my slimbook, and eventually settled for the English (Macintosh) one, which is almost the same with a few small differences. I will probably end up making my own keyboard layout which shifts some things around and replaces unused things with useful characters.

    For quick reference and learning different keyboard layouts, I recommend assigning this command to a global shortcut (I used ctrl+alt+shift+k), which brings up a keyboard preview, scaled to look good on my monitor. I haven’t found a good way of dismissing it other than using the trackpad (ideally I’d like it to only be displayed while I hold the shortcut), but it’s still very convenient.

    tastenbrett -qwindowgeometry 2500x850
    

    For some reason, my F2 button’s special feature is “toggle whether the super key is locked, without indicating the current status to the user at all”. Apparently this is a common feature, but some cursory research did not reveal why this would ever be useful, or what the intended use is. I also didn’t find many other people asking about it. What am I missing here? Why does anyone need an entire button dedicated to disabling another, unrelated button? Why can’t I make it do something useful?

    Mail

    For the moment I decided for Thunderbird for mail, contacts and calendars (more about those later), and it was easy enough to set up for mail. I’d much prefer something which looks and works like mac os Mail, but installing the Conversation extension went a long way to making it usable (despite not always finding all messages in a thread for some reason).

    Music

    For the moment I chose Quod Libet as a basic iTunes replacement. It successfully scanned the contents of Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music with no complaints, and even played the AAC m4a files after I installed kubuntu-restricted-extras. Unfortuantely Quod Libet (and every other media player I tried) seems to be unable to inhibit sleep under Wayland — hopefully this will be remedied soon, as the “create a NoSleep activity and switch to it whenever you want to play music” ““workaround”” is not particularly appealing. I’d also settle for a status bar widget which let me switch power profiles quickly.

    Photos

    Moving my photo library took a little more effort, but not much, thanks to osxphotos. Additionally installing exiftools and then running one command created a structured export of my entire library, with all the metadata I care about stored safely in EXIF fields:

    osxphotos export /Volumes/migration/photos --directory "{created.year}/{created.mm}" --filename "{created}T{created.hour}{created.min}{created.sec}{title?_,}{title,}" --skip-original-if-edited --jpeg-ext jpeg --exiftool
    

    This command takes the edited version of each file (falling back to the original), and stores them in a /YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DDTHHMMSS[_title].jpeg folder structure, which is my preferred way of organising photos on disk.

    I then imported this library into DigiKam, which quickly read all the metadata and made everything searchable. To get newly imported photos to fit into the same structure, I had to go into the Import Settings (plug in a camera or card, go “Import from device” and then open the sidebar on the right — unfortunately these settings don’t seem to be exposed anywhere else) and set the default filename to be the datetime, and the default “Album” to be YYYY/mm.

    I’m not a huge fan of DigiKam, as it’s cluttered, unstable and requires some very awkward workflows (editing images opens them in a separate window? adding a tag requires opening the “tag manager”?? “hierarchical tags”??? I think the developers did not understand what a tag is and what makes them useful) but will do for now. To ensure longevity (and ease migrating to a different management application if I find something better suited to my workflow) I opted to store all metadata in EXIF fields in the files themselves. This way, DigiKam’s external database works as an ephemeral index and cache, which I can throw away or rebuild at any time without losing anything.

    A useful tip I learned along the way (thanks to ChatGPT): exiftool -a -u -g1 <file_name> will list all EXIF data found in a given file.

    Calendars and Contacts

    I set up a Nextcloud instance on my web host to see how much of my (already limited) iCloud usage it could replace. Despite learning that Hostinger doesn’t allow access to the .well-known directory required for zero-config carddav and caldav setup, I successfully managed to get my calendar and contacts migrated there. Thunderbird was able to sync with both without any issues, and mac os Calendar did eventually read my calendars from Nextcloud. No such luck with mac os Contacts unfortunately, but that’s much lower priority than calendar anyway.

    Pages and Numbers documents

    I had hoped that there would be a way of easily and mostly-losslessly batch converting all my Pages and Numbers documents into their microsoft XML equivalents, before then converting them to Libreoffice documents later on. Alas, that is only partially true. I ended up modifying a script provided by Viking OSX, which finds all Pages documents in a given folder and exports them as word docs to a separate folder. My changes instead export them in-place, and additionally export a PDF version so that I have a lossless read-only copy of each document exactly as it was:

    #!/bin/zsh
    
    : <<"COMMENT"
    Do a recursive descent on a folder hierarchy gathering Pages document. Export these
    documents from Pages as Word .docx and .pdf documents in the same location.
    Tested: Ventura 13.0.1
    VikingOSX, 2022-12-06, Apple Support Communities, No implicit warranty or support.
    Adapted by Barnaby Walters 2023-09-08
    COMMENT
    
    typeset -gi pagesCnt=0 docxCnt=0
    
    STARTDIR=$1
    
    function pages_export () {
    
        /usr/bin/osascript <<-AS
        use scripting additions
    
        tell application "Pages"
            activate
            try
                set infile to POSIX file "${1}"
                set outfile to POSIX file "${2}"
                set outfile_pdf to POSIX file "${3}"
    
                set thisDoc to open infile as alias
    
                with timeout of 1200 seconds
                    export thisDoc to file outfile as Microsoft Word
                end timeout
                with timeout of 1200 seconds
                    export thisDoc to file outfile_pdf as PDF
                end timeout
                close thisDoc saving no
            on error errmsg number errNo
                display dialog "[ " & errNo & " ]: " & errmsg
            end try
        end tell
        -- unhide the exported filename extensions
        tell application "Finder"
            if exists (item outfile as alias) then
                set extension hidden of (item outfile as alias) to false
            end if
        end tell
        return
    AS
    }
    
    function completion () {
        /usr/bin/osascript <<-AS
        use scripting additions
    
        set DialogIcon to "/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/MultipleItemsIcon.icns"
    
        display dialog "Pages documents found: " & "${1}" & return & ¬
            "Pages documents exported to Word and PDF docx: " & "${2}" with title "Processing Complete" with icon POSIX file DialogIcon
        return
    AS
    }
    
    # do a case-insensitive recursion finding Pages documents and sorting by name
    setopt nocaseglob
    for f in ${STARTDIR}/**/*.pages(.Non);
    do
        (( ++pagesCnt ))
        # if there is no Word folder at this file location, then make one
    
        # construct the full path to the word docx document to be exported
        wordfile="${f:a:h:r}/${f:r:t}.docx"
        pdffile="${f:a:h:r}/${f:r:t}.pdf"
    
        pages_export "${f}" "${wordfile}" "${pdffile}"
    
        # do we have an exported docx that is non-zero in size?
        [[ -s $wordfile ]] && (( ++docxCnt ))
    done
    
    # give the user statistics
    completion $pagesCnt $docxCnt
    

    (aside: I initially tried to get ChatGPT to generate the necessary applescript to do this entire task for me, as I’d heard that it was good at that, and applescript is a notoriously unintuitive and badly documented language. It seemd to get fairly close but I was unable to debug the (incomprehensible) errors in its scripts. The approach taken by VikingOSX is much more efficient: use applescript only for the things it’s absolutely necessary for, and do the rest in bash or python)

    I did the same thing for Numbers documents, the necessary script changes for that are left as an exercise for the reader.

    Unfortunately, these exports (and/or their subsequent imports into Libreoffice) were not very successful except for the simplest of documents. I only actively use a total of maybe 5 documents, which I will simply reconstruct from scratch in Libreoffice, and for the rest a combination of lossless read-only PDF and potentially-broken Office XML files should be sufficient.

    Prusa Slicer, AppImages and KDE Plasma LC_ALL issues

    The official way of installing Prusa Slicer on linux is using an AppImage, a format which I’ve had mixed experiences with. This was no different, as opening it in Dolphin had no result. Opening it in a console revealed some sort of locale error, and suggested some commands to fix it, but they also had no effect.

    After doing some digging, it turns out that it’s KDE Plasma’s fault. Plasma splits your localization settings up into various categories (language, time format, currency etc.) — an excellent feature by itself. Unfortunately, if you pick different locales for any of these categories, it leave the LC_ALL environment variable empty.

    The Prusa Slicer AppImage (and who knows what other software) was expecting an LC_ALL environment variable, and refused to run without it. tl;dr, editing /etc/defaults/locale to set LC_ALL and LANG to en_GB.utf-8 allowed PS to run, without having caused any other issues (yet…?).

    Once it managed to run, Prusa Slicer somehow told the system about itself in a way which lets me launch it from the application launcher (not something every AppImage does), and worked absolutely fine. Importing my settings as a config bundle worked perfectly.

    Documents and file syncing

    For the moment I decided against trying to set up two-way sync of my ~50GB documents folder between os x and Kubuntu. Nextcloud on my cheap web host is out of the question, and Syncthing look promising but I’d want to test its limitations and performance on something smaller first. For the moment, I decided to just use rsync for a one-way migration, and can repeat it in the future as I convert more proprietary files to linux-compatible formats.

    rsync -avzu --exclude venv --exclude .DS_Store --exclude .h5 Documents/ slimbook:Documents
    

    venv and .h5 files are excluded to avoid transferring another ~30GB of unnecessary data. For syncronization after the first one, I need to make sure that rsync isn’t going to delete or replace newer files, but I will figure that out when I get to it. -u makes sure that files which are newer (i.e. made or changed) on the kubuntu side are not overwritten on subsequent syncs

    Pain points and next steps

    • DigiKam seems powerful but its UI kinda sucks
    • Plasma is great but has some drawbacks which will hopefully be fixed Soon™
    • Notes — I’m a heavy mac os Notes user, and have fairly high standards for its replacement. Nextcloud notes looks promising, but the iOS app has two editor modes: one which is fast but sucks, and another which is good but takes ~7s to load each note.
    • Converting proprietary file formats to their linux equivalents. I have some old Sketch documents and a LOT of Eazydraw documents, all of which need converting losslessly and perfectly to well-structured SVGs for use with inkscape, before I can switch completely to Kubuntu for work tasks. I had hoped to use a similar Applescript trick, but haven’t been able to figure it out yet as Eazydraw lacks an applescript interface. Using System Events to manually manipulate the menus could work, but seems fiddly
  10. Notes from the first day using a Slimbook Executive running Kubuntu (probably applies to anyone moving from macos to Kubuntu on similar hardware)

    Generally, very good first impressions. The hardware is nice, the connectivity is perfect for me, it boots fast, the screen looks amazing. The keyboard and trackpad are fine, except for the surfboard trackpad button design. Came with a bunch of stupid marketing stickers on (what year is this, 2005?), most of which were easily removed.

    Here are the first settings I tweaked to make things more familiar:

    UI Scaling

    Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Global Scale = 200% for a readable UI while still remaining beautifully crisp.

    Settings -> Appearance -> Cursors -> Size: 48

    Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Login Screen -> Apply Plasma Settings so that your login screen is a sensible size.

    Right click status bar, enter edit mode, Panel height: 100

    Sleep

    Default sleep mode seems to be a hibernation which takes 10-20s to wake up from, including whenever you close the lid.

    Fix this by: In settings -> Power Management, in AC Powered tab set lid close to just turn off screen (or lock if desired). This will just turn off the screen when closed on AC power, but actually put the laptop to sleep when the lid is closed on battery power, to reduce power consumption.

    Then, sudo nano /etc/systemd/sleep.conf and uncomment AllowSuspendThenHibernate=yes, and reboot. This changes the behaviour of sleep to initially just suspend the system, keeping data in RAM and allowing immediate wake-ups. When the battery goes under 5%, it’ll instead hibernate, which takes 10-20s to wake up from but stores the contents of RAM on the SSD.

    EDIT: On further testing, this sadly doesn’t fix the issue completely (or at all? It’s hard to tell). Putting the computer to sleep using the meta menu works absolutely fine, but using F1 or the laptop lid (which I assume are handled the same way internally) leads to this blank screen with a cursor and hidden password entry field for 20s on wake up issue. I have no idea what’s causing it, and IMO it’s a big reason not to use KDE Plasma on these laptops — sadly, as it’s easily my favourite of the linux desktop environments I’ve tried so far.

    FURTHER EDIT: turns out this was all due to the laptop coming with an outdated linux kernel installed, which didn’t support the hardware. A fresh install of the latest Kubuntu works perfectly.

    Firefox

    By default, Firefox treats scroll events from the trackpad as scroll wheel inputs, causing jerky scrolling. To fix: echo MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 | sudo tee -a /etc/environment

    Touchpad

    Settings -> Input Devices -> Touchpad
    Pointer acceleration: 0.6
    Tap-to-click, tap-and-drag enabled
    Two-finger tap: right click
    Scrolling: two fingers, invert scroll direction
    Right click: press anywhere with two fingers

    Function Buttons

    Boot holding F2 to open BIOS settings, dig around to find and enable “Fn lock” to make the function keys perform their alternative functions by default (with numbered function inputs available by holding Fn, as on a MacBook)


    Next pain points which I didn’t find a solution to yet:

    • Occasional trackpad issues where the cursor freezes and only starts moving again after a two finger tap (right click). At the beginning this happened all the time, now it seems much better. Need to keep an eye on it.
    • File browser not having a column view. Apparently this is an ongoing struggle for years in Kubuntu, which seems hard to believe. I tried to install the ElementaryOS file viewer but it didn’t seem to work.
    • Setting up the keyboard for international typing. I got extremely used to typing special characters, diacritics and fancy punctuation on my macbook keyboard and am reluctant to have to re-learn all of that. Ideally I’d like to get a least a large subset of the key combinations working again.
  11. I’m a couple of weeks into 3D printing with a Creality Ender 3 S1 Pro. My initial impressions are: tl;dr: mechanically good, firmware bad. Either install synman’s pro firmware (requires a screen downgrade) or klipper (drops the screen and requires a raspberry pi — I went with MainsailOS) and you’ll have a very good printer for the price.

    Here’s my best 3D Benchy so far, printed in 55 minutes in PETG using Klipper

    Pros:

    • Mechanically solid and well built, comes very well packed, does not feel like the stereotypical “cheap chinese” product at all
    • Quick and easy to assemble (I recommend using loctite on all screws to prevent them coming loose from vibrations)
    • Some replacement parts available
    • Well supported with (mostly quite good) profiles available for various pieces of software
    • Touchscreen interface is fast and convenient to use if you’re satisfied with the stock firmware
    • Main board is not locked-down so it’s easy to install different firmware, and just as easy to revert to stock in the unlikely event that you want to

    Cons:

    • The stock firmware is very limited and has various problems.
      • Most notably, the “print on resume” feature causes uncontrollable pauses between layers, during which the nozzle will leak filament, causing huge blobs and stringing. Not possible to turn off in the UI, requires a M413 S0 command added to the start g-code in your slicer (or changing to a different firmware, which you should do anyway). Here’s a comparison of the exact same part with and without “resume on power loss” enabled, both printed back when I was using the stock firmware:
      • The auto bed leveling feels extremely unreliable and hard to trust
      • You can only see the first few characters of gcode files, so it’s impossible to differentiate between two similar files with different suffixes
    • Fiddly to perform firmware updates — screen and main board require separate files, sometimes in different folders depending on the chipset you have (which you can only check by opening the printer and looking at the hard-to-read MCU part number), always with a new filename otherwise it’ll fail silently, both will accept firmwares for different models with weird failure modes like a rotated screen
    • v-wheels riding in aluminium extrusions have a limited accuracy. Definitely good enough for a lot of purposes, but can warp and wear over time, will never be as good as precision-ground linear rods or (even better,) rails
    • XZ gantry arrived with loose Z nuts, causing huge amounts of Z kickback and preventing any kind of accurate movement. No indication that you have to tighten these in the instructions, and sources on the web inconsistent about what you should do about it. I ended up tightening mine up so they don’t rattle and have had no further issues.
    • Flex cable XZ clip position sticker was placed slightly wrong and awkward to adjust once in, and the flex cable end at the extruder requires better stress relief IMO. I added ~6cm of heatshrink tubing around it which works great
    • The provided slicer is horrible, I only tried it out to see if it’d fix my z blobbing problems. Fortunately Prusa Slicer works great with these printers

    I tuned mine up with the usual tools until I was satisfied with the prints using the stock firmware. Then I installed klipper and set up pressure advance and input shaping, vastly improving performance and usability.

    20mm calibration cubes printed 1) on the stock firmware, 2) Klipper with a speed profile, and 3) Klipper with a detail profile (i.e. slower outer perimeters):

    Here’s my current Prusa Slicer config files for the printer itself (Klipper) and my 0.16mm layer height optimal speed print profile.

    Here’s what my Klipper START_PRINT and END_PRINT macros ended up looking like:

    [gcode_macro START_PRINT]
    gcode:
      {% set TOTAL_LAYER_COUNT = params.TOTAL_LAYER_COUNT|int %}
      {% set BED_TEMP = params.BED_TEMP|float %}
      {% set EXTRUDER_TEMP = params.EXTRUDER_TEMP|float %}
    
    SET_PRINT_STATS_INFO TOTAL_LAYER={TOTAL_LAYER_COUNT}
      G90 ; use absolute coordinates
      M83 ; extruder relative mode
      M140 S{BED_TEMP} ; set final bed temp
      M104 S{EXTRUDER_TEMP - 90} ; set temporary nozzle temp to prevent oozing during homing and auto bed leveling
      G4 S10 ; allow partial nozzle warmup
      G28 ; home all axis
      M190 S{BED_TEMP} ; wait for bed temp to stabilize so that the bed mesh is accurate
      BED_MESH_CALIBRATE
      M104 S{EXTRUDER_TEMP} ; set final nozzle temp
      G1 Z50 F240
      G1 X2 Y10 F3000
      M109 S{EXTRUDER_TEMP} ; wait for nozzle temp to stabilize
      G1 Z0.28 F240
      G92 E0
      G1 Y140 E10 F1500 ; prime the nozzle
      G1 X2.3 F5000
      G92 E0
      G1 Y10 E10 F1200 ; prime the nozzle
      G92 E0
    
    [gcode_macro END_PRINT]
    gcode:
      M140 S0 ; turn off heatbed
      M104 S0 ; turn off temperature
      M107 ; turn off fan
      # Move nozzle away from print while retracting
      G91
      G1 X-2 Y-2 E-3 F300
      # Raise nozzle by 10mm
      G1 Z10 F3000
      # Move out of the way
      G90
      G0 X20 Y150
      # Disable steppers
      M84 X Y E
    
  12. Finished the ER rando run by pivoting to the ever-reliable blasphemous blade. I tried to deal with Fire Dragonkin+Placidusax with rot daggers and the ornamental straight swords, but it just wasn’t happening. Farum Azula was a breeze, with Godskin Horah Loux, Field Trip Rennala and Fire Giant. Godskin Duo replaced Gideon Ofnir (continuing the theme of duo fights in that arena), which also wasn’t much of a challenge.

    Unfortunately, Gideon had moved one step ahead as the first phase of Godfrey/HL, followed by Mohg, Lord of Blood. Two of my least favourite fights, but blasphemous blade prevailed.

    I was getting pretty tired of the rando at this point, but my patience was rewarded when Leonine Misbegotten of the Golden Order was followed not only by Elden Apostle, but also Elden Noble, resulting in a four-phase final boss fight culminating in the dramatic defeat of… Elden Snail.

  13. First Elden Ring randomiser attempt highlights so far:

    Started out with dual rot daggers, quickly found Ornamental straight swords, Millicent’s Prosthetic and consecutive attack tear for a no-brainer dex build

    Malenia, the Fell Omen. I’m good at the Malenia fight… in her arena, with a level 125 character. Stormveil is off-limits for most of the game, but it doesn’t prevent progress.

    First hard wall was Valiant Gargoyles, The First Elden Lord. Their poison clouds can almost fill the entire arena. Eventually got them with Death’s Poker and a +10 Mimic Tear, well-supplied with rotten meat dumplings for healing.

    Smooth sailing through the underground and mountaintops until Fire Giant turned out to be ice lightning dragonkin into Placidusax. Time for a break, I’ll figure out how to deal with them later. Maybe dig out the rot daggers again…